In traditional marketing, businesses used to advertise in different mediums, from radio and tv commercials to magazines, newspapers, and billboards. The tone and place of the ads depending on their niche and target audience. Nowadays, professional marketers still face the same struggles but with slightly different options.
While traditional means of marketing are still widely used and beneficial to businesses, digital and social media marketing are gradually taking over as they proved to be less expensive and more effective for many businesses. However, choosing the right social media platform to market any business could mean the difference between its skyrocketing success and downfall.
To this day, Facebook still holds the record as the most popular social media platform with over two billion users. Thanks to its targeted advertisement feature, Facebook allows businesses easy reach to their target audience depending on their profile and interests, whether they were B2B or B2C.
With over 75 percent of its users over the age of 25, Facebook is most suitable to businesses in the fashion, entertainment, health, and news industries. But for businesses with a target demographic under the age of 25, Facebook proves to be a great waste of time and resources.
Known for its aesthetically pleasing images and a relatively young audience under the age of 35, Instagram is the perfect social media platform for businesses that sell lifestyle and fitness products or services such as travel agencies, cosmetics brands, and food and beverages.
The biggest downside to using Instagram is that it only works well for B2C businesses, as most business owners on it are there to target individual consumers, and not to consume in place of their company.
While Twitter, like other social media platforms, supports paid ads and promoted tweets, it’s one of the few sites where companies can attract a large following and build brand awareness without paid ads. After all, Twitter is most known for its use of hashtags, and its frequently updated ‘trending’ feature.
Fortunately, Twitter works well for both B2B and B2C businesses. Industries such as technology, retail, travel, and finance, perform the best. Besides, Twitter is uniquely known for connecting businesses and clients together on a more personal level, completely removing the invisible trust barrier.
LinkedIn is a platform that was made with businesses over socialization in mind. It’s the perfect place for B2B lead generation and employment search. Generally, most LinkedIn users are over the age of 30, but it has witnessed an increase in the number of younger users joining the platform.
While hashtags and paid ads are strongly present on LinkedIn, its most powerful feature is its networks. Connecting with employees, employers, and CEOs of businesses and startups is the perfect way to build professional relationships with potential clients. LinkedIn is mostly recommended to businesses in the legal, manufacturing, infrastructure, and IT industries.
Pinterest gets easily overlooked without realizing its hidden potential. While it’s true that Pinterest mainly works for B2C businesses, it can work for B2B companies if their target audience is small businesses run mostly by young women under the age of 45. In 2019, Shopify reported that 93 percent of pinners use Pinterest to plan their purchases.
Similar to Instagram, Pinterest marketing and brand building relies heavily on aesthetic and shareability. This makes it the perfect platform for businesses in the travel, beauty, event planning, and fashion industries.
To sum up, it’s generally ill-advised for any business, whether B2B or B2C, to focus on a single social media platform for marketing and internet presence. After all, social media websites are businesses themselves, and they go through management and ownership changes all the time. A change in a platform’s terms of service (ToS) or algorithm could mean the end of a business if it doesn’t have a solid presence elsewhere while it rebuilds and adjusts to changes.
